The Battle of Evil Empire

by Frank Warner
Original title: New World Order

Sunday, March 5, 2000
Page: A01

Seventeen Years Ago
This Week, Ronald Reagan Called the Soviet Union the Focus of Evil in
the Modern World. The 'Evil Empire' Speech Disturbed the Political
Universe, but the Critical Words Almost Went Unsaid.

President Reagan's Evil Empire Speech, often credited
with hastening the end of Soviet totalitarianism, almost didn't happen.

According to presidential papers obtained by The
Morning Call, Reagan was thwarted on at least one earlier
occasion from using the same blunt, anti-communist phrases he spoke
from the bully pulpit 17 years ago this week.

And former Reagan aides now say it was their furtive
effort in the winter of 1983 that slipped the boldest of words past a
timid bureaucracy.

With clever calculation, the Evil Empire Speech eluded
U.S. censors to score a direct hit on the Soviet Union.

"It was the stealth speech," said one Reagan aide.

In the spring of 1982, the president felt the reins on
his rhetoric. The first draft of his address to the British Parliament
labeled the Soviet Union the world's "focus of evil." He liked the
text. But Parliament never heard those words.

U.S. diplomats and cautious Reagan advisers sanitized
the text of the speech, removing its harshest terms, according to
documents from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley,
Calif.

But nine months later, Reagan spoke in Orlando, Fla.,
and delivered many of the passages deleted from the London address. His
Orlando speech is known as the Evil Empire Speech.

The speech alarmed moderates of the West, delighted
millions living under Soviet oppression and set off a global chain
reaction that many believe led inexorably to the fall of the Berlin
Wall and to freedom for most of Eastern Europe.

The Reagan Library papers provide fascinating insights
into the drafting of what may have been the most important presidential
statement of the Cold War. They also reveal that, despite the
unremitting influences on him, the president himself decided what he
would say.

"Let us be
aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its
omnipotence over individual man, predict its eventual domination of all
peoples of the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world,"
Reagan told the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983.

An audience of 1,200 was first to hear the words "focus
of evil" in the Citrus Crown Ballroom at the Sheraton Twin Towers Hotel
in Orlando.

And other phrases slashed from the Parliament speech
were resurrected in the Evil Empire Speech.

» The 1982 first draft said, "Those cliches of
conquest we have heard so often from the East are ... part of a sad,
bizarre, dreadfully evil episode in history, but an episode that is
dying, a chapter whose last pages even now are being written." The
sentence was censored in London, but in Orlando Reagan said, "I believe
that Communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose
last pages even now are being written."

» The London first draft included the words of the
late British novelist C.S. Lewis: "The greatest evil is not in those
sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. ... It is conceived
and ordered ... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by
quiet men." The words were held until Orlando.

» The British were to be told that appeasement is "the
betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom." The phrase was
cut. In Orlando then, Reagan said, "But if history teaches anything, it
teaches: simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our
adversaries is folly — it means the betrayal of our past, the
squandering of our freedom."

» Also eliminated from the London speech was the
reference to the Soviet Union as a "militaristic empire" whose ideology
justifies any wrongdoing. In the Evil Empire Speech, the empire concept
returned in a more powerful form.

Anthony R. Dolan, Reagan's chief speechwriter at the
time, said he doesn't remember exactly which excised parts of the
Parliament speech, often called the Westminster Address, resurfaced in
the Evil Empire Speech. But he said it wasn't unusual for a White House
writer to try the same words twice.

"You mean, was I recycling? Yes," Dolan said in a phone
interview. "Sure, we did that all the time."

Dolan, now a Washington, D.C., consultant to Republican
politicians, was principal author of both the Westminster Address and
the Evil Empire Speech, but he doesn't claim either speech as his own.

"They're the president's phrases," he said of the Evil
Empire Speech. "I wrote a draft. The president gave a speech."

But Dolan did write the paragraph that gave the Evil
Empire Speech its name. In it, Reagan called on the evangelical
ministers to oppose a "nuclear freeze," which would have prevented
deployment of nuclear-tipped missiles in Western Europe to counter
Soviet missiles in Eastern Europe.

The "evil empire" paragraph was never part of the
Westminster Address. But in the 32-minute Orlando speech, it was the
centerpiece. It was the longest sentence — so long that, on the day of
the speech, only one television network, CBS, let viewers hear all 72
words:

"So in your discussions of the nuclear
freeze proposals I urge you to beware the temptation of pride — the
temptation to blithely declare yourselves above it all and label both
sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the
aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a
giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle
between right and wrong and good and evil."

Energized by a sentence that wrapped the entire Cold War
around two radioactive words, the Evil Empire Speech defined the Reagan
presidency. The words are forever linked to the man, who today is
suffering from advanced Alzheimer's Disease at his home in Bel-Air,
Calif.

And as the Reagan papers show and former
Reagan aides confirm, the speech was the climax of a continuing debate,
in and outside the White House, about how the president should talk
about the Soviet Union.

At his first news conference on Jan. 29, 1981, Reagan
said of Soviet leaders, "They reserve unto themselves the right to
commit any crime; to lie; to cheat." There was ample evidence of Soviet
misdeeds then, but Reagan's critics accused him of choosing fighting
words when the world's other superpower deserved a respectful tone.

By 1982, as Reagan prepared for a trip to Europe, the
White House staff was divided over how he should approach East-West
relations in the speech before Parliament. Various speechwriters
submitted proposals.

But Reagan was not impressed until National Security
Adviser William P. Clark Jr., his horse-riding friend from California,
showed him the dauntless draft that Dolan had written on his own. Five
times, the draft branded the Soviets "evil."

Because this was to be Reagan's first major address on
foreign policy, the draft would pass through the State Department,
other executive agencies and senior White House staffers before Reagan
could complete it.

Reagan Library documents do not reveal what Secretary of
State Alexander Haig, his State Department, or Reagan's staff said
about Dolan's draft, but all but one reference to evil in the Soviet
Union vanished from the final text. The reference that survived was not
a statement, but a question: "Must freedom wither — in a quiet
deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?"

Of the written comments available on Dolan's Westminster
draft, Clark's are the most candid and complete. Next to an
introductory joke, he wrote, "Not funny." Next to another joke, he
wrote, "Too many jokes."

And beside a proposed conclusion — not written by Dolan
— reminding Britain of "the dark days of the Second World War when this
place — like an island — was incandescent with courage," Clark noted,
"It is an island." "This place — like an island" eventually was changed
to "this island."

Reagan wanted the Westminster Address to echo the themes
of Winston Churchill's March 5, 1946, "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton,
Mo. So Dolan borrowed Churchill's phrase, "from Stettin on the Baltic
to Trieste on the Adriatic," for an update on Communism.

Clark checked a map and objected to "Trieste on the
Adriatic." As the southern point of the Iron Curtain, Trieste was too
far west to suit him. "Avoid lumping Yugoslavia in with the Soviet
bloc," he wrote. There were Austria and Greece to keep in the Free
World, too. In the end, Churchill was rewritten.

"From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea,"
Reagan told Parliament, "the regimes planted by totalitarianism have
had more than 30 years to establish their legitimacy. But none — not
one regime — has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted
by bayonets do not take root."

The president was accompanied to London by Clark, Haig,
Chief of Staff James A. Baker and aides David R. Gergen, Michael R.
Deaver and Richard Darman. Dolan flew out, too.

"They called me at the last minute, probably because
they thought I was angry at the changes made," he said.

Dolan said he believes a few senior advisers muffled the
sterner words of his first draft. The problem, he said, was that "the
pragmatists" in the White House were afraid to let Reagan be Reagan
while they steered "the true believers" away from the president.

"The speechwriters were looked at as true believers," he
recalled. "Now Jim Baker and Gergen and Dick Darman and Mike Deaver —
that group was thought of as people who wanted him to tone down his
anti-Soviet rhetoric and raise taxes and sort of go back on the Reagan
Revolution."

The true believers resented the influence of the
pragmatists. They saw the pragmatists as trying to remake and restrain
the leader they helped elect. The true believers wanted a chance to set
Reagan loose.

In early 1983, the National Association of Evangelicals
invited the president to speak before its convention. "We suggested a
topic: generally, religious freedom and the Cold War," said Richard
Cizik, then a legislative researcher for the NAE's Washington office.

Tensions were building over the planned deployment of
Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe. President Carter had
agreed to ship the intermediate-range missiles to counter the Soviets'
SS-20 missiles, but Carter's decision was left to his successor to
implement.

Reagan offered the Soviet
Union a "zero-zero option" on the missiles. If the Soviets dismantled
their SS-20s, he said, he would cancel deployment of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization missiles.

At the arms negotiations in Geneva, the Soviets were not
taking the offer. Instead, they encouraged the nuclear freeze movement,
whose leaders in America and Europe were arguing persuasively that the
world already had so many nuclear weapons it would be immoral to deploy
even one more.

U.S. religious leaders joined the debate. The National
Conference of Catholic Bishops was considering a resolution in favor of
the freeze, and the National Council of Churches, a Protestant
organization, and the Synagogue Council of America already supported
it.

The National Association of Evangelicals, long known for
its social conservatism, nevertheless discovered increasing numbers of
its membership opposed deploying the NATO missiles, even if the Soviets
did not remove theirs. Many of its members were pacifists, most notably
the Quakers and Evangelical Mennonites.

Cizik wrote Reagan, asking him to speak at the NAE
convention in Orlando. The invitation went out over the signature of
Cizik's boss, Robert P. Dugan, director of NAE public affairs in the
capital. Reagan accepted.

At the White House, Aram Bakshian Jr., director of
speechwriting, assigned Dolan, then 34 and a former Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist, to write a draft. Other White House aides
didn't pay much attention.

"They thought it was a routine speech," said Dolan, a
Catholic and a Reagan fan since he was 13. "It was a group of
conservative ministers, and since I was the staff conservative they'd
give it to me."

At a steakhouse across the street from the White House,
Dolan and fellow presidential speechwriter — and future California
congressman — Dana Rohrabacher sat down in a booth with Cizik and
Dugan.

"I told the speechwriters that day, 'Look, the
freezeniks are making real inroads into the evangelical heartland, and
the president needs to address this issue,'" remembered Cizik.

"I told them, 'You've got to understand our crowd. If
you think you're going to come down there and encounter an entirely
receptive audience, no.' I was pitching sort of a theological content."

Dolan and other speechwriters met with Reagan on Feb.
18, 1983. They might have commented on the coming NAE speech then, but
Dolan does not recall for certain. According to Reagan Library records,
Gergen, Baker, Darman and Deaver also were at the meeting.

Reagan had other speeches to discuss. That night, he
would speak before the Conservative Political Action Conference in
Washington. On Feb. 22, he would talk to the American Legion. And there
were many smaller toasts, talking points and Rose Garden statements in
between.

The president also was planning a six-day trip to
California, where on March 1 he would greet Queen Elizabeth II at his
mountaintop ranch near Santa Barbara. After stops in Los Angeles, San
Francisco and Oregon, he would return to Washington on March 5, three
days before speaking to the evangelicals in Florida.

In the meantime, Dolan wrote his first draft at his
office in the Old Executive Office Building, next to the White House.
"It took a few days, maybe half a week" to write the 16 pages, he said.

The first half of the draft was on domestic policy,
including abortion and school prayer. The second half was on world
affairs, principally the nuclear freeze and the "evil empire."

The "evil empire" paragraph was in the first draft, the
Reagan papers show.

"Beware the temptation of pride — the temptation to
blithely declare yourselves above it all," he wrote.

Dolan now explains that, in denouncing pride, he was
thinking about elitists who regularly soft-pedaled the repressions,
invasions and mass killings of totalitarian regimes.

"You always had the New York Times trying to strike a
neutral position and advise both sides of its lofty and higher
perspective editorially," he said. "That's just people who are puffed
up.

"Pride causes foolishness — pride in the sense of one of
the deadly sins."

In his draft, he also wrote that in the debate over the
nuclear freeze, religious leaders ought not "label both sides equally
at fault." He says now he was rejecting an oft-repeated argument that
Soviet totalitarianism was just another system, no worse than free and
democratic systems.

"This is moral equivalence, remember?" he said. "The
Left saved its real moral indignation for middle America, rather than
Soviet aggression and oppression of others. It was blame America first,
that was their first instinct."

Then Dolan wrote of "an evil empire." Today he denies
the term was inspired by the 1977 hit movie "Star Wars," in which an
alliance of good guys battles the "evil Galactic Empire." Nevertheless,
the words conjured that mainstream image.

The term "evil empire" also was a form of psychological
warfare.

"People who are involved in evil enterprises fear the
truth," said Dolan. "That's why the mafioso fears the newspaper account
of his wrongdoing more than jail time."

Dolan used the word "evil" seven more times in the
draft.

Two references to evil were applied to the United
States: to its past denials of equal rights to minority citizens and to
"hate groups preaching bigotry and prejudice."

Dolan submitted his draft on March 3, while the
president still was in California. James Baker, William Clark and other
senior advisers were with Reagan.

At the White House, Aram Bakshian, the speechwriting
director, went over the draft. Bakshian saw four references to the
Soviet Union as evil. He particularly liked the term "evil empire."

Bakshian and a small group of like-minded White House
staffers remembered how similarly candid words disappeared from earlier
Reagan speeches. They set out to save "evil empire."

The draft began with churchly pronouncements on parental
rights, school prayer and "pulpits aflame with righteousness." As a
result, Bakshian said, it didn't appear at first glance to be anything
the State Department or other senior officials would want to review.

"This was not a major speech on the schedule," he said.
"It looked like a speech for a prayer breakfast. It would have seemed
like one of the lowest priority speeches."

The Office of Speechwriting regularly placed drafts of
presidential speeches in piles for circulation throughout the
bureaucracy. Certain White House staffers were responsible for looking
over the texts and routing them to the agencies that might want to
comment. If the staffers didn't notice the subject matter, the drafts
might not go far.

"I made a point of not flagging it," said Bakshian. "It
was the stealth speech.

"If anyone in the State Department read it, they just
read the first few paragraphs and set it aside. They didn't know it was
going to be a foreign policy speech. On the face of it, it wasn't a
foreign policy speech."

Sven Kraemer, arms control director on the president's
National Security Council, was asked to review the draft, giving
special attention to the section on the nuclear freeze debate.

Kraemer gave Dolan a few minor written suggestions on
March 4, the Reagan Library papers show. Kraemer said he had even more
to say out loud.

"Not everything that is said between friends is put on
paper," he said. He said he urged Dolan to mention Russian dissident
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's 1975 description of the Soviet Union as "the
concentration of World Evil."

"A suggestion that I made was that the phrase 'evil
empire' be correlated with Solzhenitsyn's phrase, so that the location
of those two words be linked."

Solzhenitsyn was not added to the speech, but Kraemer
joined the team dedicated to preserving Dolan's draft.

"Relatively few people saw it (the draft), and some of
the senior people saw it late in the process," he remembered. "It got
to be a pretty narrow circle, and it got to be pretty late in the day,
and some of us agreed that this is wonderful that some others were not
there."

Reagan returned from his West Coast trip on March 5. His
wife, Nancy, stayed in California to see her daughter, Patti Davis, and
to tape a special anti-drug-abuse episode on the "Dif'rent Strokes" TV
show.

By now, three days before the scheduled speech in
Orlando, the West Wing "pragmatists" —David Gergen and others — had
discovered Dolan's draft and were raising objections, according to
Dolan.

Memories are unclear here, but Dolan recalls his text
came back with "a lot of green ink" crossing out the "evil empire"
section.

"It's not a vivid memory," he said. "It's just a
recollection. It was not the phrase itself. It was the whole section in
which all this was included."

Whoever crossed out the section expected it to be
deleted before the president saw the draft, but Dolan would not allow
it.

"I said, 'I just won't go along with those. In this
case, let's just let the president decide on this.' I rarely took a
stand like this, but I was disgusted because this stuff was crossed
out.

"I said, 'Why don't we just send the draft in as it
is?'"

Reagan would see all the words, Dolan said, "but he was
going to get the draft with people telling him, look, we don't like
this section, that section, the other section."

Reagan received the draft, and probably worked on it the
evening of March 5 and then again on March 6.

He wrote another page and a half on his opposition to
providing birth control pills and devices to underage girls without the
knowledge of their parents. He removed a section on organized crime.
And on the foreign policy side of the speech, he added a further
defense of his earlier comment that the Soviets lie and cheat.

"Somehow this was translated to be accusations by me
rather than a quote of their own words," he wrote.

After a paragraph proposing the reduction of U.S. and
Soviet nuclear missiles, he scribbled in three sentences guaranteed to
fire up a standing ovation: "At the same time, however, they must be
made to understand we will never compromise our principles &
standards. We will never give away our freedom. We will never abandon
our belief in God."

He also wrote two paragraphs about the faith of
conservative actor-singer Pat Boone, whom Reagan did not refer to by
name. And he tightened and edited other parts of the text.

When Reagan was done writing and rewriting, the Soviet
Union still was "the focus of evil in the modern world." It still was
"an evil empire."

David Gergen said six years later that he and Deputy
National Security Adviser Robert "Bud" McFarlane toned down the
"outrageous statements" in the draft, according to Reagan biographer
Lou Cannon.

The Reagan Library documents show that the president —
possibly with advice — removed parenthetical putdowns of the
"intelligentsia," the "glitter set," the "unilateral disarmers," the
"old liberalism" and the anti-religious sectors of the news media in
the United States.

"The fact of the matter is, the important stuff on the
Soviet Union got in," Dolan pointed out.

Gergen, now editor-at-large of U.S. News & World
Report, could not be reached for comment for this story, either at his
office at Harvard University or through U.S. News.

As the final draft of the Evil Empire Speech was typed
on March 7, 1983, Reagan asked for a list of specific reasons to oppose
a nuclear freeze.

The NSC's Kraemer wrote up a two- or three-page memo,
which the president boiled down to four paragraphs. Reagan also wrote
out his position in a nutshell: "I would agree to a freeze if only we
could freeze the Soviets' global desires."

The four new paragraphs were typed onto two index cards
and clipped to the main text, with a note reminding him when to pull
out the cards.

March 8, 1983, was a busy day for the 72-year-old
president, the Reagan Library papers show. After breakfast at 7:45
a.m., he met with 22 members of the Senate and the House to discuss the
bloody conflict in El Salvador. At 10:13 his helicopter lifted off from
the White House lawn for Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

As he left, 5,000 supporters of a nuclear freeze were
rallying in a cold rain at the Capitol.

And the protesters cheered when U.S. Rep. Jim Leech,
R-Iowa, announced that the House Foreign Affairs Committee had just
voted 27 to 9 in favor of sending a nuclear freeze resolution to the
full House.

At 10:38, Reagan left on Air Force One for sunny
Orlando, where he arrived at 12:14 p.m. Chief of Staff James Baker was
with him, but not Dolan and not one member of Reagan's cabinet.

Walt Disney World was the president's first stop in
Orlando. At Epcot Center, he saw a program — in film and
audioanimatronics — on 300 years of American history. And after meeting
at Epcot with foreign exchange students, he moved to an amphitheater to
talk with outstanding math and science students.

At 2:33, the
president arrived by motorcade at the Sheraton Twin Towers Hotel. At 3
p.m., Arthur E. Gay Jr., president of the National Association of
Evangelicals, introduced Reagan to the 1,200 attending the NAE
convention.

As the evangelicals applauded, the smiling president in
a dark blue suit rose from his chair, his speech papers in his left
hand. He shook hands with Gay, thanked him and set his 17 pages and two
index cards on the lecturn. "Evil empire" was on page 15.